Cognitive Dissonance

 Cognitive Dissonance and Psychoanalysis

The theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ arises from a common sense belief that, if someone holds two ideas or desires or opinions that conflict, this conflict should cause mental discomfort and that the holder of the opinions will do something to lessen the discomfort. 

He or she may abandon one idea, possibly, or gain new information or beliefs to lessen the dissonance; if there is commitment to an idea, the person may adapt their belief or behavior, by forgetting, by reducing the importance of one of the dissonant elements or—in particular—by seeking to convince others whose adherence will confirm the cherished belief.

The "convincing" or persuading occurs by force of attitude or inner state versus by words, or rhetoric.

When people with strongly held beliefs are confronted by evidence clearly at odds with their beliefs, they will seek to resolve the discomfort caused by the discrepancy by convincing others to support their views rather than abandoning their commitments. They will seek, for instance, some means of re-establishing cognitive consonance without sacrificing their religious convictions or metaphysical ideas.

The psychoanalyst Langs felt strongly about this problem and presented the methodology of interpreting the interactions with a patient - verbal, behavioral, psychological - by hypothesizing an interpretation based on given evidence, and then wait for validating evidence later in the therapeutic situation before offering the interpretation. This kind of double checking provided a way of self-refuting interpretations based on counter-transference and establishing convincing evidence for the interpretation.

What Langs does, and what Popper exclaimed about, is to seek to falsify or disconfirm hypotheses that are primarily growing within the inner-dialogue between analyst and analysand on the basis of interpretations of talk.

I suppose however that over the time of a psychoanalysis a long series of hypotheses are generated, some are remaining without being falsified, and the gambit is to consider these as true or false, or as meaningless. But, the main issue of dissonance - convincing others on the basis of your own commitments - is avoided.